Trick or Treat
by B.Vain
Summary: Choice is an illusion, and all roads lead to one end. Everytime he knocks on her door, she lets him in. A ritual that is hard to qualify.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Not mine, Fairy Tail or its characters. I do own the plot though.

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Chapter 1

"Why is it," her long fingers gently rub the herbal paste over the gashes running across his back. He hides a wince as the dull agony is resurrected by the stinging goo.

He focuses on the sound of her voice, and trusts it to carry him away from the pain, the burden of life that continues solely to deliver death. Her voice is a refuge for his mind that is wounded worse than his physique.

"That everytime I see you, you are covered in wounds?"

It's raining heavily outside. The low hiss along the muddy ground and soft pounding against the hovel's wooden roof fill the room while she awaits an answer. Knowing none would come. But that was their ritual. He would drag himself to her doorsteps, bleeding and broken, and she would pull him in and patch him up.

Only today he breaks the silence, their ritual, to say,

"Because you are the only one who cares for the wounds and not the inflicters."

A rebel, then, she concludes. No one else would take him in, not without investigating into the origin of injuries. And in some matters lies just don't fly. That's the only explanation.

The king has gone mad and the kingdom madder supporting his extravagance and eccentricities when they could hardly scrape enough to feed their young twice.

She wondered how long before the Men of Valor- the King's cruel enforcers- would track the rebel to her abode on the hillsides. (Why haven't they already? Must have their hands full, crushing resistance cropping up everywhere.)

What kind of punishment awaited her when discovered, she mused. Would she get to face the local priest? Tried in the Count's Court? Or will she be raped before being murdered? Buried in a shallow grave to be dug out and gnawed by beasts.

Her stomach clenched unbidden even as her mind recounted the possibilities with indifference, remembering the first time it had happened. The men who had tore through her, slapped and choked her. Her skin crawled remembering their hard hands twisting her young frail arms painfully, pushing up her legs, tearing off her dress, all the while she screamed, next to her corpses of her family, their warm blood soaking into her flaxen tresses.

"There," she said finally. Her voice despite herself soft and pained. "All done."

The rebel twists his neck to catch her eye. She slids further to the side away from his sight, hiding the look of faint terror that may have crawled out from the pits of her hellish past till she regained composure.

"You are bothered. By my visits?" The first part is a statement. He must have picked up on the pain in her voice. A bright fella, this one is.

"No," she answers smoothly. A bald faced lie. He does bother her. Just not the way he suspects.

She walks around to face him and kneels to tend the wounds on his chest and arms.

He looks at her carefully, studying her face. He has sensed the lack of sincerity in her reply. He should know, he is a master of lies.

"I need you," he finally says, the words wrenched out of him by a sudden desperation that hit like an intense spell of nausea. It's a plea and a prayer; a confession and a resignation.

She looks up at him and holds his gaze. She sees his white face slack with fatigue but a struggle burning in the brown of his eyes.

His lips part and close, the Adam's apple bobs in futility. But she hears the words he's unable to conjure, unspool the emotions cluttering him.

"I know," she says simply, her voice back to its smooth sooth.

And they fall silent, listening to each other breathe. His shallow and quick; her even and deep.

The rain washes the landscape relentlessly outside, thunder rolls imperious and to the rhythm of soft scrapes as she dips her fingers into the wooden bowl of green goo, he begins to nod off.

"What's your name?" Her beautiful voice twinkles through fog of lifetimes worth of fatigue.

"Gray," he mutters. "Previously, Son of Silver and Mika. Now, the Orphan of Man. Born on 15th Winter and reborn on 32nd Summer..."

He speaks some more but the words slur into a meaningless sludge. No sense could be salvaged from them.

But what she did discover confirmed her doubts. He is a boy of 17, an orphan drafted by rebel leaders to keep alive a savage, dwindling struggle for survival.

A rueful smile caresses her lips and her eyes soften remembering she was almost his age when the caravan smuggling her noble family was attacked by rebels; when she was dragged out and butchered.

Even a decade later death and destruction continue to rampage. Collateral damage keeps piling up, and soon the world would tilt under the burden of corpses. The golden crowns sitting precarious even now would tumble to brown feet of the downtrodden and earth would become the sky and an inferno would boil naked underneath.

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A/N: So, yeah... trying something I always wanted to write. I am not sure what the age diff between Ultear and Gray is, so decided it would be 10 yrs for this fic.

Feedback would be deeply appreciated. They are basically the blood of every fic.


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer:** Still don't owe nothing.

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 **** **"That's how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men... cruel."**

 **-** **Alfred (Batman vs Superman)**

 **Chapter 2**

 _Falling Skies (2)_

Ultear eases him down on the bed on his side soon as she finishes wrapping his wounds in strips of clean linen. He has fallen asleep, but aside from slumping slightly forward he remained seated upright till she was done. Considerate, even when unconcious.

But not considerate enough.

The linen Ultear used had been bought for this express purpose. And it hadn't come cheap. The swathes had cost most of the earnings she made by bartering batches of medicines that had taken her six gruelling months to prepare.

Prices have skyrocketed. Trade routes are choked with pulndered caravans and rotting corpses, falling prey to the anarchists' three pronged strategy.

The rebel armies cannot fight on empty stomach and, no matter how sympathetic to their cause they exhort to be, their "friends" would not part even with a bowstring without gold.

Secondly, scaring off the traders hits the King and His subjects hard. Harder than it does them. Replinishng funds might become a bit of a problem in short term for rebels themselves, but they have several alternates- the Crown doesn't. Loss of trade from East for long would cripple the Kingdom. And the longer it takes for safe passages to be ensured, the lasting the scars will turn.

And the last, also the cruelest, part of their approach was to hammer the locals into joining the rebels' cause. Manpower is always in demand especially when the nature of occupation includes maiming and murder on a regular basis. And while common folk are largely peace-loving, desperate times make villains out of us all. Their sources of livelihood, the businesses that served as the backbone of the district's economy, were largely dependant on the patronage that the plining merchants brought. As their numbers reduced drastically the businesses dried up and blew away. People have been forced into unemployment.

Seeing their lives plunge into hopelessness with no reprive visible in near future, in their desperation, they jump the bandwagon.

The Crown has stationed forces at some of the chief roads- the Golden Veins, as they are called- but that doesn't seem to help the situation much. The manpower doesn't come cheap- meaning taxes, levied upon those that people already pay to keep the Crown plump and happy.

Then, of course, there was the matter of corruption. Members of the Valor demanding commisions for services they are honor bound to provide.

All these things have conspired to make live hell in the region. But even if the situation is at an all time worst, Ultear should have been able to get by well had she chosen to play her hand differently.

Medicines in any age are greatly sought after, but the current crisis had raised the value of her services and goods literaly to gold. Or it would have, had the people any. They could barely afford a square meal. And it broke Ultear's heart to watch women succumb to anemia, toddlers with bloated bellies and bony limbs hobble and bray helplessly. And, even though the swathes of linen hadn't been among them-mainly they were purchased directly from a passing merchant instead of a townsfolk- there are things that cannot be bought with gold. Things like loyalty; love; the infinite gratitude a father feels when his newborn is delivered safely and his wife not only survies but continue to live healthy.

Not to mention the peace of mind it brings.

But saving this boy- Gray- hadn't been done for any of those reasons.

It hadn't broken her heart to see him torn and bleeding. At one point in her life, she had torn and bled men herself with impunity. Suffering of barbarians has never stirred sympathy in her heart. And, from the moment she had first seen him, there had been a lingering doubt in the back of her mind that he was one.

Harboring him under her roof didn't fill her with warm fuzzy contentment but evoked dark musing of the cruel fate that would befall her should their collusion be discovered.

Yet there is no denying the tenderness she felt while tending his wounds. The ache that throbs in her chest everytime he speaks in his tired melancholic voice. The sadness his departure fills her with.

Why?

Why risk her life, squander her meagre resources on a man- a boy- she never knew; who has only ever repayed her efforts with mere words, even if they were sincere, of gratitude.

This line of thought made her wonder if she had done it for some reward, then?

Ultear carefully pulls the sheets over Gray, mindful not to irritate his wounds.

But what reward could she have hoped to receive from him- a boy whom she had known, even without it being explicitly stated, had no one to go to and spent his days battling for basic rights? At best he was a savage, at worst a slave. So what were her expectations of him- of herself- when she took him in, healed him, fed him and kept his secret at a great personal risk?

The hovel is suddenly plunged into inky shadows as lightning screams outside and thunder smashes the skies.

There are no answers forthcoming to solve Ultear's dillema. None uncomplicated, at least. And she has no appetite for complicated. She wouldn't have secluded herself to a forgotten cranny of the world if she did.

Maybe, it had just been a passing whim. An impulse she had given in to and now refused to abandon lest her efforts be washed down the gutter- the only place she could imagine no name rebels like him get in lieu of a burial site.

Yes, that sounds somewhat logical and thoroughly uncomplicated. Just one of the vagaries of her whimsical self. So much easier to deal with.

Happy with her rationalization, Ultear rose to her feet and with a sigh of relief moves away. She pulls a book from the rickety shelf and plops down in a chair by the window and within moments loses herself in its pages.

A booming thunder jolts her awake hours later. The book hits the floor with a thud as Ultear sits ramrod straight with a start in her chair. She glares ahead, wide-eyed, for few disconcerted seconds, her chest rising and falling quickly.

Soon coherent thought floods in and realization strikes that it had only been thunder that awoke her. She sags a little in the chair, sweat breaking out on her brow. Ultear massages her temples slowly and allows herself a weary groan.

It's past evening and the room is pitch black now. The rain outside continues unabated.

Ultear rise from her chair and carefully navigates in the dark to the cupboard where she keeps the candles and the kerosene lamp. She pulls open the doors and takes out a couple of candles.

Seconds later the dark receedes to the corners as the match is struck and the candle lit.

Ultear's eyes immediately flick to the bed where she finds Gray lying in exactly the same position she had left him.

She picks up the book from the floor, sets it back on the shelf and moves to Gray's bedside.

His breathing seems to have become less labored. There is no sign of pain on his face. Ultear tells herself that she should be a little nonplussed at the inhumane rate his body seems to heal but for some reason even the first time she watched him stroll out of the door just after a night's rest- stab wounds healed; broken arm all but fixed- it hadn't truly shocked her.

But the wounds this time are worse. She doubts any other human being would've even been able to make it to her door. Much less sleep them off like a bad hangover. His injuries, their sheer number and placement, make it seem as if he wereb ambushed by a squad. The wounds on the back were particularly barbaric.

Idle curiosity wonders what or rather who gave him the worst of them, but decides she does not care much. When it comes to Gray, only his health seems to matter to her.

And the small talks they had.

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a/n: Another short chapter. And even though the tale doesn't progress much, I felt a peek into Ultears bewildering mind, full of inconsistencies and peculiar notions, was needed for us to progress.


	3. Chapter 3

**Discaimer:** I don't own Fairy Tail.

 **Chapter 3: Falling Skies 3**

Gray awoke to sharp smell pricking his nose. It took his sluggish mind a moment to register that the stench was emanating from him.

He slowly emerged from the murky depths of slumber and awoke to a world saturated with agony. His head throbbed with discomfort. The sharp smell felt like a comfort compared to the red gashes pulsing painfully across his torso, running up and down his arms and legs.

His back, however, was a different story altogether. Mere words could not sufficiently relate that agony. It was as if someone had cleaved it open with a white hot axe- which considering what had actually been done to him wasn't so far from the truth- and poured molten brass into the gape.

Gray tried to take a stock of his surroundings, gauge the passage of time. It was both a force a habit and need of the moment. But that enterprise was beset by his senses shrouded in haze of pain that offered muddy information at best. He had no idea how long he had been there. And he wasn't entirely certain where here even was. All he could recall was feeling a vague sense of security. The inquiry "Where am I?" inexplicablty was followed by a memory of times when he was once a happy child, not yet orphaned: his house during breakfast. Gray couldn't tell if it was his mind's way of answering the question or if it was simply going haywire.

He was about to slip back into unconciousness when soft footsteps, hurried, yanked him back up.

"Are you up?" her soothing voice made his his lips twitch involuntarily, till she added his name. "Gray?"

How did she know his name? Had he told her? Was she not the woman who heals him? What was going on?

He tried to ask, open his eyes to inquire, but the only word, shriveled and peeling, that escaped his parched lips was, "Water."

Realizing Gray was more or less conscious, Ultear hurried away. She grabbed a bowl the kitchen counter and took it to Gray.

"Here," she said. slipping an arm under his head and raising it just enough. She brought the bowl to his lips and tipped its content into Gray mouth.

Gray immediately pulled away as the bitter medicine burned on the tip of his tongue.

"It's okay," Ultear reassured, her hold on him firm. "This will bring your fever down." Gray felt a twist of petulant rage but had no choice but to obey.

He gulped the vile concoction down as quickly his abused and uncooperative state would allow him.

Ultear eased him down and Gray let out a sigh of relief. He struggled to stay awake, to catch a glimpse of her once- it was a desperate need he had , almost as ardent as his thirst had been. But his lids could barely part and the darkness was already closing in. By the time he did manage to see her it was through a veil of grey whose edges were slowly curling black inwards.

He saw her face, pale, beautiful, unblemished, float a moment in darkness, like full moon on a clear night, till his lids slid close and his mind did replace the face with a moon, creating a memory that never was and went blissfully blank.

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a/n: Another short update. Enjoy.


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